The invention relates to voicemail, and more particularly, to systems, products and techniques that facilitate improving a caller's ability to provide complete, accurate information necessary in the context of the call, as well as to facilitate the call recipient's (callee's) ability to retrieve specific information from the voice mail and follow up with the caller to supplement information as needed.
Voicemail is a well-known and frequently used technology for facilitating communications between individuals who may not be simultaneously available for participating in a real-time communication, typically a telephone call. In many contexts, voicemail is a suitable substitute for direct communication between the individuals, especially when the amount of information needing communication is small, e.g. a simple sentence or message less than 15 seconds in length which conveys only high-level information such as the caller's identity and basic reason for calling.
However, in other contexts, especially commercial contexts, the nature of the call may be much more complex, and may require communicating a significant amount of potentially complex information (e.g. alphanumeric strings to identify products, individuals, services, etc.). As such, the voicemail system may include a detailed, lengthy prompt instructing the caller regarding the information that is necessary in the context of the call, followed by a lengthy response by the caller providing such information.
While traditional voicemail systems are perfectly adequate to present and record complex information and allow retrieval of such information at the callee's convenience, it is often difficult for the caller to ensure all needed information is provided (e.g. because the caller may forget some of the instructions while providing the response, may not understand part or all of the prompt, or may not have access to all the information designated by the prompt). Similarly, the callee reviewing the caller's response may not properly or completely obtain all needed information from the response, and/or may need to replay the entire response several times in order to retrieve all needed information included in the response.
Along similar lines, traditional voicemail systems simply present the prompt, and record the response, are therefore rely entirely on the callee and caller to ensure the prompt and response are complete and sufficiently clear to be understood. Traditional voicemail systems are unable to independently determine prompt or response completeness.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide systems and techniques that facilitate callers understanding the information necessary in the context of a particular call, providing all such information in a voicemail response, and independently validating completeness of the voicemail response. It would be of further benefit to facilitate callee retrieval of information from the caller's response without requiring the callee repetitively listen to the entire response.